NW

Zadie Smith's NW opens with a quote that dates back to the London of 1381, when a large gathering of common folk marched into the city down the old Kent Road, demanding higher wages and the abolition of serfdom. John Ball, one of the rebellion's nominal leaders, put forth the rhetorical question: "When Adam delved and Eve span / who was then a gentleman?" -- which by implication rejected the idea of there even being such a thing as a gentry class. King Richard II addressed the rebels from the opposite side of the River Thames (safely out of arrow reach) and promised clemency for all. When they laid down their arms, Richard had their leaders executed, their heads mounted on spikes outside the Tower of London. Richard's speech, interestingly, was the first known instance of an English king actually speaking English (since 1066, England's Norman rulers had spoken French).

Fast forward six hundred years or so, and set your compass for NW, a quadrant of London created by the postal system. There are a few "posh" or middle-class neighborhoods there -- Hampstead and its heath, College Park, and St. John's Wood (pronounced "sinjuns wood"), the last of which was home to a record high price paid for a private home. But large areas of the district are working class and poor, their inhabitants dwelling in council flats (what we'd call public housing) in places with names like West Hendon, Cricklewood, Wood Green, Tottenham, and Colindale (the latter once home to the British Library's newspaper room, before it went digital and was closed down). There's no Mary Poppins here, no Jane and Michael Banks -- but there are plenty of Leroys, Kevins, and Olivers -- and, in Zadie Smith's world, Leahs, Keishas, Felixes and Nathans.

Theirs is a world of unpredictable outcomes and mixed verdicts, of ambitions simmering in a pot from which there's no easy escape. Some are "cleaning up" their lives, though sometimes it turns out that it doesn't matter; others have "arrived" at higher class status, but still lead lives doubled by subterfuge. Cultural identities are jumbled in the heap, and while coming from a Jamaican or Pakistani family doesn't prevent some from climbing the class ladder, it also doesn't guarantee any kind of group solidarity -- it's every man and woman for themselves.

The structure of the novel mirrors this jumble, with short epiphanies and snippets of chatter sprinkled among longer, more narrative passages. Some sections take one down the proverbial stream of consciousness, while others are almost entirely dialogue. Typographically, that dialogue is handled rather differently here: we don't have traditional lines of speech with quote marks, but rather a smaller typeface, inset from the main text, as though we were momentarily donning another lens. The effect can be mesmerizing, but also confusing. You also may find yourself puzzling over a word -- of course, you can always Google it -- but you may also find the slang dictionary at peevish.co.uk to be of some use. Oh, and a map of course! -- this one is scalable, though this one's more fun; another will show you how to get about by bus. There's even a map of poverty itself, which will show how intermixed and variegated it is.